Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

bitc-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 64 posts

Re: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

#51

Post by javascriptlol »

javascriptlol wrote: post #49
lusr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan Shapiro is not a traditional PL researcher. He is the architect and lead developer of EROS (www.eros-os.org) and CapROS ( http://www.capros.org ), and the author of a vast number of papers on secure and high-performance reliable real-time operating systems. The confinement mechanism in EROS was provably secure (i.e. provably impossible for applications to leak permissions) by Shapiro, and AFAIK is still the…

A better idea would be to just build a small system whose security was obvious. Computer scientists are right to mimic mathematics. They're just mimicking it too directly. Mathematics is based on construction from simple axioms and cross-checking of different theories. Computer systems should be reduced to small parts with redundant checks against human error. If you prove a kernel "correct" that just means it will b…

Why downvote? HN has really gone down the tubes. Why do peopel who downvote harmless comments without a response get downvote privileges?

Re: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

#52

Post by lusr »

javascriptlol wrote: post #51
javascriptlol wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better idea would be to just build a small system whose security was obvious. Computer scientists are right to mimic mathematics. They're just mimicking it too directly. Mathematics is based on construction from simple axioms and cross-checking of different theories. Computer systems should be reduced to small parts with redundant checks against human error. If you prove a kernel "correct" that just means it will b…

Why downvote? HN has really gone down the tubes. Why do peopel who downvote harmless comments without a response get downvote privileges?

Wasn't me (I can't downvote) but I have had a similar experience in the Go thread so I share your frustration. This is the reason I stopped visiting Reddit.

Re: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

#53

Post by alexgartrell »

javascriptlol wrote: post #49
lusr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan Shapiro is not a traditional PL researcher. He is the architect and lead developer of EROS (www.eros-os.org) and CapROS ( http://www.capros.org ), and the author of a vast number of papers on secure and high-performance reliable real-time operating systems. The confinement mechanism in EROS was provably secure (i.e. provably impossible for applications to leak permissions) by Shapiro, and AFAIK is still the…

A better idea would be to just build a small system whose security was obvious. Computer scientists are right to mimic mathematics. They're just mimicking it too directly. Mathematics is based on construction from simple axioms and cross-checking of different theories. Computer systems should be reduced to small parts with redundant checks against human error. If you prove a kernel "correct" that just means it will b…

I've read many of your comments on this thread, and I believe most of them to be unrealizable for non-trivial applications. Anyone can write a simple web-service, but how does one write a super low latency network file system in such a way that "security is obvious?"

Re: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

#54

Post by willvarfar »

javascriptlol wrote: post #51
javascriptlol wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better idea would be to just build a small system whose security was obvious. Computer scientists are right to mimic mathematics. They're just mimicking it too directly. Mathematics is based on construction from simple axioms and cross-checking of different theories. Computer systems should be reduced to small parts with redundant checks against human error. If you prove a kernel "correct" that just means it will b…

Why downvote? HN has really gone down the tubes. Why do peopel who downvote harmless comments without a response get downvote privileges?

I just downvoted you because you are saying something dismissive about someone who has clearly spent a long time studying the alternatives and making a balanced informed decision.

Now it may be that you have some great insight but your post doesn't seem to give me any epiphanies.

Re: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

#55

Post by pjmlp »

ajross wrote: post #41
edwinnathaniel wrote: post #5

These days Java seems to become one of the choices to do system programming in a different area/level: HBase, Hadoop, Cassandra, GWT tools, MQ, App Servers (Jetty, Tomcat, GlassFish, etc), EhCache. Unless if people categorized the above software as non-system-programming.

It's mostly a semantics thing, but no: most "systems programmers" would not categorize those applications as "systems tasks". They're just apps. By convention, "systems programming" means dealing with the bottom of the abstraction stack. Java code can't make syscalls. Calling conventions for Java methods aren't specified at the level of CPU registers or instructions. So writing a JVM is systems programming. Writing a…

It is possible to do syscalls in Java.

Following your example there are also JVMs coded in Java.

Re: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

#56

Post by ajross »

pjmlp wrote: post #55
ajross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly a semantics thing, but no: most "systems programmers" would not categorize those applications as "systems tasks". They're just apps. By convention, "systems programming" means dealing with the bottom of the abstraction stack. Java code can't make syscalls. Calling conventions for Java methods aren't specified at the level of CPU registers or instructions. So writing a JVM is systems programming. Writing a…

It is possible to do syscalls in Java. Following your example there are also JVMs coded in Java.

It is certainly not possible to do syscalls in "Java". A system call is a special CPU instruction (e.g. INT, SYSENTER) not accessible to or defined in the Java VM specification.

What you do to effect a syscall is to call a JNI function to do the work. JNI is a C (!) API, defined in terms of the C (!) ABI for the platform.

And sure: you can generate native machine code in Java, just as you can in python or bash or even BASIC. But you can't call it.

Re: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

#57

Post by ajross »

ijt wrote: post #45
ajross wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. The difference in terseness and clarity is made up almost entirely of the lenths of the symbol names: template void sort(I a, I b, C cmp); Now, the concepts aren't 1:1; Haskell for obvious reasons doesn't represent the idea of operating on storage directly, so you can't have an iterator and need to return a "new" list. C++ makes you write out the types you are parametrizing instead of getting it implicitly. A…

The difference is not only due to identifier length. Haskell's sort is a function in the mathematical sense. By looking at its type, I can see the input and output at a glance and understand how to use it. It's not immediately obvious from the signature of the C++ sort procedure that the "first" and "last" arguments are being used for both input and output. When you abbreviate the identifiers for STL sort it's even l…

There's nothing "immediately obvious" to that Haskell signature at all. You need to understand the [] syntax for list typing. You need to understand that the language defintion has a built-in notion of "list". You need to understand the idea of functions having types themselves (a huge hurdle if you're new to functional languages). And you need to understand that weird "Ord" decorator gadget and that it means the types can be compared. Basically, you can't understand that line noise at all unless you know Haskell. Duh.

Likewise, if you're truly confused about C++ STL iterators you're just waving your own ignorance around. They're a simple concept pervasively applied in the library. No experienced programmer is going to be confused by that function declaration.

Look, very good cases can be made for functional languages. But this is just surface-level stuff that frankly isn't going to help anyone. Expressing a sort simply isn't a complicated thing in C++ or Haskell and trying to claim otherwise is just dumb.

Re: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

#58

Post by stonemetal »

andrewflnr wrote: post #35
stonemetal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Towards the bottom of that page it mentions color forth. That is what he uses. It is a forth like language that removed punctuation and replaces it with colors.

Ah, upon further reading, colorForth has its own operating system, so he probably uses that too. I had seen the forth bits, but the GP implied he was using some non-Unix OS, and I was still curious about that.

Sorry I wasn't clearer about that. Much like there were Lisp machines in the 80s Mr. Moore ran(perhaps still runs) a company that does custom Forth machines. So he uses his own hardware and his own software, turtles all the way down so to speak.

Re: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

#59

Post by javascriptlol »

willvarfar wrote: post #54
javascriptlol wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why downvote? HN has really gone down the tubes. Why do peopel who downvote harmless comments without a response get downvote privileges?

I just downvoted you because you are saying something dismissive about someone who has clearly spent a long time studying the alternatives and making a balanced informed decision. Now it may be that you have some great insight but your post doesn't seem to give me any epiphanies.

Well feel free to let software rot into pure shit under these continued rationalisations. What a great service you're doing to the users.

Re: Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

#60

Post by javert »

lusr wrote: post #47
javascriptlol wrote: post #10

Also, this paper suggests that the answer to multi-tasking problems is to move the complexity out into the language. It's funny how PL researchers will always spin the situation so that it demands more PL research. If we're really moving into a many cores future as people suggest, then we should have architectures that give each application a dedicated core. No context switching. Of course, you'd need a simple system…

Jonathan Shapiro is not a traditional PL researcher. He is the architect and lead developer of EROS (www.eros-os.org) and CapROS ( http://www.capros.org ), and the author of a vast number of papers on secure and high-performance reliable real-time operating systems. The confinement mechanism in EROS was provably secure (i.e. provably impossible for applications to leak permissions) by Shapiro, and AFAIK is still the…

I've been looking through EROS, CapROS, Coyotes, etc. for a bit - thanks for all the references.

Is there still any forward motion here? It seems like a lot of the sites haven't been updated for a good number of years. A notable exception was BitC, which was news from 2010 - still not that recent.

Post reply on HN